Poster: Digital Capture of Design Heuristics to Represent Sustainability Knowledge in Product Design

Heuristics are knowledge assets formulated as simple rules of thumb intended to simplify the achievement of goals. Such heuristics offer far-reaching advantages in the context of product development in the acquisition, transfer, and representation of knowledge to achieve engineering excellence and delivery robustness like, e. g., in form of DFX objectives. Within the research project, standardised descriptions for design heuristics as well as a web app have been developed. Heuristics can serve as a vessel to capture tacit knowledge of individual product developers which would otherwise not be integrated into Knowledge Based Engineering Systems (KBES) or Information Systems (IS). In this paper, the app’s evaluation results are described, regarding the items effectiveness of knowledge utilisation and knowledge transfer. Subjects to the testing were 16 product developers from the automotive industry and 2 researchers from the same field from China and Germany